


Shamescripts

by GoldenThreads



Series: Moribund [3]
Category: New Mutants, X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene, Other, Past Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-06
Updated: 2014-05-21
Packaged: 2018-01-14 20:37:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1278151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenThreads/pseuds/GoldenThreads
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the midst of Bastion's attack on Utopia, Warlock tries to negotiate his guilt and grief, Doug doesn't try at all, and Kitty watches it all fall apart. (A collection of Second Coming tie-ins.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Kurt's Funeral

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kitty and Warlock, grieving together during Kurt's funeral.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Copious reference to their time together in Excalibur, especially [this incident](http://24.media.tumblr.com/af9754558167baa58e8b86de9eed2954/tumblr_n21d2bBI5n1smkrxao1_1280.png) (warning for immolation of techno-organic lifeform??) and the floppy disks with Doug's diary on them.
> 
> Additionally, this takes place relatively soon after the New Mutants took down the Right in St. Louis, where Warlock killed a few hundred people. He is...not okay.

“Kitty?”

Peeking cautiously into Med-Bay, Warlock eyed the empty beds and double-checked his scanners for nearby life-signs. The dim lights and crisp silence had transformed the room into a solemn, forbidding place, and nostalgia prickled at his circuits as he tiptoed inside. The science and medical labs had always been off-limits when they were children — the perfect hiding places for hide-and-seek. Utopia could’ve lived up to its name that way, as a labyrinth of unfamiliar rooms for games of exploration, instead of a prison where every room was all too real, all too needed.

Warlock had never been a very good seeker; he cheated every time. But this time there wasn’t even anywhere for Kitty to hide. Trying for heart and cheer enough to spare, Warlock tapped his nose against the glass of Kitty’s containment chamber and chirped, “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

No answer. Warlock could see her crouched down in the bottom of the chamber, her knees pulled tight to her chest, but unless she turned to face him he couldn’t read a word from her mouth. She probably didn’t feel much like talking. Though the signal was faint, there was no mistaking that same dark wave of grief that had washed over the entire island. Words weren’t enough.

Kurt was gone.

“…Do you want to watch?” Warlock asked softly. It wasn’t fair that Kitty couldn’t attend the funeral, but questions of _fairness_ only twisted him into knots, so he’d turned his frantic misery towards solutions instead. Kitty came first. That was what Kurt would’ve wanted. “I left a spy-eye outside, so…we can watch, if you want.”

Maybe Kitty hadn’t even heard him; she felt as far away now as when she’d raced among the stars. Warlock raised his hand to knock again at her chamber, then dropped it silently back to his side.

He didn’t have any right to be there. Not on the beach with the others, where even those who’d never really known Kurt had turned up to mark the passing of such a good man. Not in Med-Bay, where he could hide behind old friendships and pretend to be useful. Not even on Utopia itself. Every time Warlock thought of his beloved teammate, a blood-slick whisper rattled through his heart: _at least Kurt will never know what you did._

Just as his flight instinct kicked in, shamescripts running unchecked, Kitty rose to her feet. She wiped a hand over her face, tried to compose herself, and turned to greet him with a forced, wavering smile.

_I’ve done this too many times,_ Kitty told him, shaking her head as she swallowed down a bitter laugh. The tears returned to her eyes, and this time she didn’t even try to rub them away. At first crying had been a rare outlet for her frustration and delight, but now she knew otherwise. The tears never stopped. There was no crying herself to sleep and waking up empty, yet somehow okay. No terrible sense of accomplishment in dry, red eyes. No end to her grief.

Warlock watched her in silence, unsure of what to say, how to connect. She was always the one pulling him back to earth, not the other way around.

_You should go._ Kitty tucked her head against her chest and motioned toward the door. _Don’t miss it for my sake._

With a soft clatter, fragile as glass, Warlock’s crest slowly flattened back against his head. “I…” He wanted to be there. He hated funerals. He was wired and exhausted and could barely keep his scripts straight as it was. “…Don’t want you to be alone.”

Seeing the lie for what it was, Kitty gave a nod. _Alright._ She closed her eyes, took a deep breath that rushed straight through her, and opened them once more. _Play it._

Warlock snapped his fingers. On cue, wings unfurled from his back and stretched themselves into a massive screen spanning the entire width of the room. One tendril of Warlock’s hair shifted into an old-fashioned movie projector, and a few others turned into speakers. He sat down in front of Kitty’s chamber and tried not to make a joke about their lack of popcorn. Even when his heart was broken, solemnity wasn’t his strong suit.

The stars were out in full brilliance, heavens shining bright to mock their loss, and Warlock refined the image until every pinprick of light had been mapped onto Med-Bay’s ceiling. The audio came in with perfect clarity as well, yet Warlock barely listened, trying to compartmentalize his thoughts from his live-casting. He didn’t want to know the words — empty wishes and lies about the heavendimension, one and all.

Kurt would frown to hear him think that way, frown and curl his tail just so, and suddenly Warlock wished he wasn’t carnage and stardust, wished he too had silly liquids that could fall from his eyes. Even when he shut them and tucked his face against his knees, he could still see the picture, the roaring fire. Rahne told him you should bury people to keep them safe ( _and look how that turned out_ ), but stories of heroes only ever ended two ways: a happily ever after or a funeral pyre.

He could throw himself upon it. People did that, sometimes, in mourning. He’d purged the very notion from his mindbank, but his sickness let every evil slither back in, and the dancing flames spoke to him of birthrights and monsters who swallowed suns for sport.

It wouldn’t burn the poison from his circuits, it wouldn’t even hurt. Warlock remembered when it did, when hellfire swept through his usurper and left him/them screaming their speakers to dysfunction. An innocent bystander, then. Not so innocent now. He could almost see it again through those foreign, disjointed memories — Kurt standing over him in judgment, malice in his eyes.

The memory glitched with longing, and instead of that gloating devil, he could see Kurt reaching through the fire to offer a hand. Warlock’s thoughts broke into a cloud of static, smoke blacking out the records that scrolled through his mindbank without end. He’d stolen the recruit list from the St. Louis dataset and tried to match names to split-second captures of screaming faces. It wasn’t enough. He could engrave every name in his memory, but the faces all blurred into the same ghoulish feast. His friends said the soldiers were monsters; Dani always said _you are what you eat._

Warlock counted and counted the names, and still he saw Kurt reaching for him, still his stupid heart tried to pretend forgiveness known but never given could be enough.

On screen, Kurt’s real friends gave their farewells one by one. Something shifted in the air as Ororo raised her face toward the distant moon, palpable even in Med-Bay. The stars flickered. Warlock glanced back at Kitty’s chamber and found her slamming her fists against the glass, trying to get his attention as he drifted through waking nightmares.

_Turn it off. Turn it **off!**_

Kitty crouched down and pulled her knees to her chest, staring firmly away from the window so she wouldn’t have to watch the footage anymore. It was the same position she’d taken earlier, but now it was even harder to disbelieve. She wanted _so badly_ for it not to be real. Her hands shook. Maybe even she wasn’t real, and if she wasn’t real then this was all just a horrible dream, and Kurt was still alive and all her friends were fine and—

A loud bang rang out from the tubes connected to the containment chamber, pipes clinking and clanking, and then with a hiss and a pop a stream of liquefied Technarch poured inside and reformed beside her. Warlock shivered, circuits righting themselves, and stubbornly curled up into a mirror image of her own pose.

_What are you doing?!_ Kitty gasped, inching away from him.

“I’m not leaving you,” he told her matter-of-factly. “You’re on your own plenty. Everyone else has each other right now. Conclusion: Not leaving, nope, negative.”

_You—you idiot._ She hated when he used that voice, but loved him for it too, for a secret that made her feel wanted. _You know what’ll happen if I touch you like this._

Warlock shrugged. There was barely enough room in the chamber for his long and lanky limbs, and his elbows clanged against the metal walls. “So? You’ve done it before.”

_…I was having a bad day._ A fist through his chest hadn’t exactly been the best welcome in the world, and Kitty had no intention of repeating it.

“You’re having a bad day now, too.” Warlock patted at his shoulder and gave her a hopeful look. His eyes were the warm, ruddy gold of honey, dark pools of it among the soft lines of his face, full of more melancholy than his usual beacons could ever manage. It was the way he’d looked when she saw him last, when he was _lost_ and didn’t want to admit it.

Right now Kitty felt pretty lost herself. She scooted over to sit by his side, so close that their shoulders touched and his outline quivered from the interference. It must have hurt him, it always did, but his sad, gentle smile never faltered.

They sat there in silence for a long while. Without realizing it, they each did the other’s share — Kitty crying enough for two, Warlock wailing on frequencies none could hear.

_I didn’t get to hug him,_ she sobbed. _I didn’t even get to say **hello**._

A few short weeks earlier, when Warlock accompanied his selfsoulfriend on a perfunctory investigation of the compound, they’d turned a corner and found Kurt there speaking with a student. Warlock froze up. He didn’t know if his old friends and teammates knew what he was, and he barely had any explanations himself. There wasn’t any reason to expect a warm welcome when he wore such a different face — the New Mutants were even reluctant to accept his old one.

But Kurt’s face lit up when he saw them there in the hall, together, and he swept forward to shake Warlock’s hand and welcome him home with a fond, flashy smile. No one else had bothered.

“He lent me his image inducer once,” Warlock said suddenly. “He didn’t tell me it was stuck on Errol Flynn. The looks I got in town! I wasn’t nearly dashing enough to pull it off.”

Kitty slowly raised her head and stared at him in confusion. _No one’s as dashing as my fuzzy elf._

“I did my best. Kurt even gave me lessons in Dashing Dancing, but I had two left techno-feet.”

_…For the wedding?_

“Yup. Moira found us waltzing in a storage room. She was still laughing at me a week later…”

The corner of her mouth twitched, and Kitty wiped at her eyes. _Tell me,_ she said, lips moving so gently that it must have been a whisper. She laid her head against his shoulder and let her knees bump against his.

Warlock could never deny her anything. “Did you know he was the one who taught me to make peanut butter sandwiches? But the jam wasn’t colorful enough, so I had to…improvise a bit. And then Kurt said: _Add whatever you’d like, but don’t expect me to eat it!_ ” Pickles in his peanut butter, but no pepperoni on his pizza. A boy of truly refined taste. “That was the end of my brilliant culinary career.”

The stories tumbled endlessly onward. One time Kurt and Meggan had recruited him for some incomprehensible prank on Brian, only for them all to get locked in the lab as the sprinklers went off, a certain elf making a quick escape and leaving the rest to their soggy fate. Another time, after some field mission, Kurt had nagged him about his embarrassingly slow reflexes until he finally consented to a round in the training room. He’d spent the next two hours trying to shift a fully-functional tail, successes and failures all to Kurt’s immense delight.

If it hadn’t been for Kurt, Warlock had little doubt he’d have stayed down in the labs with Moira for good. He was useful there, the perfect worker bee. It was fun having movie marathons with Meggan, going out for malted milk with Rahne, and watching Kitty tinker with her newest tech, and he treasured those days above much else, but sometimes he’d felt like he was only on loan, a valuable piece of equipment instead of a friend.

“He always came looking for me,” Warlock said quietly. The grand hand gestures and expressive faces that had accompanied his stories were all gone now. “I mattered to him.”

_Of course you did. We all did._

“Exactly! Everyone mattered to him, even me. I was someone.” Kurt never let him forget he was part of the team, and he never left him behind. It didn’t matter who got their claws into him — aliens, intelligence agencies, or the red-faced scum of the Earth — Kurt always led the rescue effort. “It was the first time I…I mean, the first time Douglock really believed it.”

Kitty scooted over to the other side of the chamber, leaned forward on her knees, and jabbed a finger at his chest, just enough to make his circuits spark and fizzle. _Don’t ever stop believing it. Don’t forget Kurt’s faith in you._

Like a tin man without his oil, Warlock’s joints froze up in one jarring swoop. She didn’t know what he’d done. He bowed his head in misery, but Kitty reached out and let her hands crackle at his cheeks until he looked at her once more.

_Promise me._

“…Self promises,” he hummed, soft enough to pretend he hadn’t.

The shift in his scripts signaled the conversation’s abrupt end. Kitty crossed her arms over her chest, far from resigned, and gave his stubbornness a moment of thought. _Warlock, can you do me a favor?_

“Query: Additional promises?” He tilted his head, eyes gone wide as saucers. “Promise supply running low…”

Scowling at his act, Kitty fought off the urge to shock him again just for the heck of it. _It’s not a promise. I need you to find something for me._

“Scavenger hunt?”

_I had this shoebox full of old pictures, but I don’t know where any of my stuff ended up. Can you track it down for me? Ororo might know._

Warlock nodded. Though it was a strange request for wartime, he knew she wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.

_When you find it, you have to take out Doug’s pictures._ Those damn tears were welling up in her eyes again. _And put in one of Kurt. A nice one, okay?_

“Affirmative.”

 

*

 

Nobody slept that night. When Warlock tracked down Ororo and asked about the box, a deep sorrow passed over her face, realization and resignation all in one. She knew exactly where it was, safe on her shelf, and she even helped him track down pictures from everyone’s photo albums. Most people wouldn’t have given him a second glance if Ororo hadn’t been there beside him.

“Did she tell you what this is?”

Their quest complete, they sat down together on the floor of Ororo’s room with the box between them. She smoothed her hands reverently over its worn cover, just as she’d done time and again since it came into her possession, then pushed it towards Warlock. “Open it.”

Inside was a thick pile of photographs, all of them happy, some going back nearly a decade. Illyana’s smiling face greeted him first off, and as Warlock reached into the box to pull all the happy photos out, a half dozen floppy disks spilled free. Each one was sealed up tight in a clear case, taped shut for extra securitty, and marked with the same name.

Warlock startled as Ororo laid a hand over his, internal chronometer skipping a beat. It took him a moment to remember to breathe, a moment longer to remember it wouldn’t help. Wires coiled in his chest in place of lungs.

Ororo helped him pick up the floppy disks, then gently closed his fingers over them. “I don’t think these belong here anymore,” she told him with an understanding smile. She spread out the photographs on the floor next to them and sorted through as if playing a card game — a pair of arcades, a full house of golden swoops and cheeky grins. Doug’s photos went in a neat little pile by Warlock’s knee.

“And these…” Ororo glanced at the ones of Kurt that they’d gathered. Their beloved elf was smiling and laughing in every single one, and photo-bombing with a sudden burst of brimstone in more than half. “These don’t belong here at all,” she murmured to herself, tears threatening to fall once more.

Her alien companion had drifted away, thumbing absentmindedly at the stack of photos and floppy disks as he stared at another picture he’d borrowed from the box, so Ororo tidied up herself. In went Illyana, in went Kitty’s father, in went Kurt. It was lighter now than a few years prior, and she tried to consider that a hopeful tiding.

At last the only picture remaining was the one in Warlock’s hands.

He’d talked Piotr into handing that one over, and the man had given him the strangest, saddest smile as he went to fetch it from a book on his shelf. Warlock hadn’t looked at it until now —an Excalibur team photo with all of them in attendance. He even remembered the day it was taken, since he spent a good ten minutes fiddling with the camera’s timer and threatening to overwrite it with Phalanx tech if it didn’t behave. But they got it in the end, the simplest team mission they ever accomplished, and now it could stand for all of them, for Kurt and for Moira and for the spirited little subscript that never should have been.

Ororo nudged the box towards him. “I’ll keep it safe,” she promised.

That was what you did with the people you loved. You put them into boxes, and tried to keep them safe when it was already too late. Warlock laid the picture in the box and watched as Ororo closed it up tight. Before she could take it away, he put Doug’s pictures and the disks on top. They couldn’t go inside, but they still belonged to Kitty. Sort of.

“Self does not possess storage location.” It was a feeble excuse. He’d become accustomed to lying, yet never got any better at it.

Ororo rose and carried the box over to a shelf filled with tokens and framed photos of the dead and living alike. As soon as her back was turned, Warlock made for the door, eager to leave her to her grief — he’d bothered her enough already.

“Warlock?”

Her voice stalled him in his tracks, and her warm hand on his shoulder made his knees wobble. He didn’t protest as Ororo pulled him into a hug, his head drooping against her shoulder.

“Don’t be a stranger,” she told him, smoothing down his tired crest. “There are no strangers in grief.”

Warlock didn’t answer her. From her window, he could see dark clouds moving in to mask the brilliant heavens from earlier. He waited for them to pass, for a break in the shadows, for one little light to wish on. For a moment the clouds parted just enough—

And all the stars were gone.


	2. Farewells

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Doug puts his affairs in order before accompanying X-Force to the future.

A suicide mission.

Doug didn’t need his powers to know what they were really asking. The desperation in the set line of Scott’s mouth, the slight tension in Emma Frost’s hand where it rested against her arm, each sign only confirmed what he had known all along: he was a tool returned to them for a singular purpose. If anything, the weight in his chest finally _lifted._ This was it.

Fulfill his duty, save the world, and slip back into oblivion. He wasn’t even scared.

He didn’t feel anything at all.

Ten minutes to put his affairs in order. Doug folded up his team uniform, corners squared, and laid it down on his neatly made bed. He didn’t own anything else. He could have written a letter to leave on top, but he hadn’t any words that mattered.

All his language had been swallowed up by Shan’s screams. Hours in the plane praying for them to stop, praying for them to continue lest silence mean something worse, pretending he still knew how to pray at all. He could read how far beyond her usual pain threshold she was by their timbre alone — told himself they didn’t process, noise noise noise. The steady flicker of the flight radar, a bead of sweat rolling down the side of Sam’s cheek as he clutched at the controls, critical classification of the clouds that whipped by outside the windows, these were safe, these were anchors, like Warlock’s hand curled along the back of Doug’s headrest, still reaching for him, still, even when every inch of him read _wrong_ and it was all Doug’s fault, and the screams, _still._ Some decrepit empathy unfurling where his heart should be, viciously self-centered, slipping away into the meta of an unequal trade. No balance to maintain; he couldn’t have returned simply to doom Shan instead. He had to make it right.

Warlock would never forgive him.

It was better that way. After what Doug demanded of Warlock, turning his best friend into a weapon of destruction to save his own skin, he didn’t deserve that forgiveness. Never would.

The others would not mourn so much, soldiering on like always. He was only ever a ghost in their eyes. He would fade.

Nine minutes.

_Ghosts._ Doug hurried from the room, door left ajar in his haste, and made his way through the abandoned halls. Though almost everyone had already joined the fray or been evacuated, an infectious tension flooded the complex.

Eight minutes. He ran.

Med-Bay was startlingly empty for a war zone. He could hear Dr. McCoy performing surgery in the partitioned corner room, and Magneto slumbered fitfully in one of the nearby beds, but otherwise there was some measure of privacy for this all-important mission.

Five minutes.

Doug pressed his palm flat against the glass of Kitty’s containment chamber, tried to summon those normal scripts that were nowhere to be found. “You didn’t get a goodbye last time,” he began, skipping to the end by mistake. He hated the chill of his own voice; he hadn’t anything more to give her. “I can’t wrong you the same way twice.”

A frown of confusion twisted Kitty’s face as she laid her hand over his from the other side of the glass. She hadn’t expected to see him there, frantic and breathless. If they were at war, mission ops would need him and all the information his clever head could glean. No one had told her anything at all, not a word since Kurt’s funeral the night before. There wasn’t time. The world rushed on without her.

He tried to guess what words would be appropriate to the situation, what words could comfort her and carry on in his stead. A feeble effort, he had to admit.

“Thank you for coming home, Kitty. You were just in time and I was so, so late.”

_Doug, what are you talking about? What’s wrong?_ She mouthed the words quickly, concern careening into panic.

“No time. I need you to do me a favor.” Doug held her gaze and waited until she nodded her assent before continuing. “Look after Warlock for me.”

_Don’t you **dare**._ Kitty clenched her fists against the walls of her containment chamber, biting back the urge to yell, however useless. Not again. Not him, not to her, not after such a long and lonely night crying her eyes out over another addition to her memory box. _There’s another way, Doug, there’s always another way. Just—just pull up a chair, okay? We’ll figure something out together, like the good old days, remember, and—you can’t do this to ‘Lock, you don’t understand—_

“I do understand. He hates himself.” He looked away, and for a moment she saw a flicker of something there in his eyes, gone again in an instant.

_Dougie…_

“When he looks at me,” Doug amended quietly, jaw tight. “He hates himself when he looks at me.”

Even before Doug painted Warlock’s hands with human blood, something broke in him whenever he turned Doug’s way. There wasn’t any hiding it. It never faded, only grew more gaunt and guilty by the day.

They’d been right all along: the Doug they wanted never really returned to them. He was only some ghastly monster in a familiar shape, a haunting that now even Warlock regretted. He couldn’t let them place their trust in him a moment longer.

At least this way he could be useful.

“I _am_ sorry.” Doug dropped his hand, curled his fists at his sides. No matter what happened next, victory or failure, at the very least Kitty would be safe. He consoled himself with that knowledge. “Tell everyone, all right? Even if it didn’t last very long, it was…worth it.” Or something. Ineffectual, even for a meaningless platitude.

_Don’t do this to me,_ Kitty hissed at him, fighting against her tears. She mourned too much already; she refused to stand there crying while her friends marched off to die. _You promised me._

Doug offered her a smile, but she only saw Douglock in those cold eyes, scripts running but the heart all gone. “Goodbye, Kitty. Try to forgive me this time.”


	3. War/Locked

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warlock does his share during the battle against the Nimrods.

_Mutant: Query for Definition?_

It wasn’t polite to taunt one’s prey, but Warlock couldn’t resist. The Nimrod caught in his jaws didn’t respond, so he gave it a good shake to check for life before dropping its husk into the ocean below. Another pair of them were approaching from the north, and he shouted his query aloud this time, flitting towards them like a flying monkey straight out of a dystopian steampunk Oz.

No matter how many Nimrods he skewered and shredded, they refused to recognize him as an enemy. Warlock didn’t fit their narrow definition of mutantkind. Perhaps he’d been classified as native wildlife, or background static not worth their attention. Perhaps they thought him docile.

The X-Men had made the same mistake — or offered the same charity, Warlock wasn’t sure. Everyone had their orders except for him. Mutantkind’s final battle didn’t require his attendance.

 _Another one bites the dust,_ he sang as the pair of Nimrods crumpled in his grasp.

When the wounded and noncombatants were evacuated, Warlock accompanied Shan as far as he could, fussing and fretting until she grabbed him by the chin and yanked his head down to eye-level. “I don’t want you here. I want you up there giving them hell. For me, okay?”

For her, Warlock stripped the cowardice from his heart and the kindness from his face, let his usual scripts shrivel away under his birthright, and shifted into an abomination that even his siredam would be proud of, all teeth. The lifeblood of hundreds threaded through his circuits, his stats all pushed beyond their max. They needed a weapon like him, whether they wanted him or not.

 **Chekov’s gun never stays on the wall** , hummed his Ramseyscripts, and for a moment Warlock thought it was his selfsoulfriend’s voice in his ear.

The comm lines were all down, save the telepathic ones he couldn’t hear anyway. Warlock let his taunts broadcast endlessly, tempting as many Nimrods into his grasp as he could. He pretended Doug could hear them, too. An audience of one for his epic boss battle.

_War, war, what is it good for~?_

Maybe Bastion didn’t appreciate his serenade, because the next round of Nimrods was a full troop of ten. They’d begun to break through the X-Men’s perimeter at a startling rate. Warlock didn’t want to think about what that meant for the teams out on the bridge.

He brandished his fists at the enemy and gave them a good snarl, but only one Nimrod took heed, staring straight at him with a piercing gaze. The troop leader hung back as the others converged on Warlock. It took all of his concentration to deal with them, shifting nimbly out of the way of every attack while attempting to herd them away from Utopia. Two was a breeze; ten was overkill. For all his energy, Warlock had little experience running the complex scripts required to manage such numbers.

As he paused to smash a pair of Nimrods against each other, a third and fourth fired on his unprotected back. Warlock howled in pain, circuits hissing and bubbling along the path of the wound. It closed off soon enough, but he couldn’t take many hits like that. Just his luck that the Nimrods would finally notice him at the worst possible moment.

At the sound of his shriek, the Nimrods jerked back in unison. Warlock dropped low, hoping to circle around and pick them off one by one. They’d regret that momentary flinch.

But the Nimrods didn’t give chase.

One moment they hovered there in solemn communion, and the next they burned and fell from the sky. A few started babbling something in a glitched speech, a slur of random sounds from failing memory banks as their programs failed one by one.

Hesitantly, Warlock drifted back to investigate. The remaining Nimrods all snapped to attention and watched him with their beady red eyes, and they didn’t react as he crushed one down as easily as a car in a junkyard. An explosion gutted another one nearby, and its functioning left side kept it spiraling in pitiful circles as it plummeted into the ocean below.

Only the leader remained. It broadcast a screech of strangely familiar static, harmonic almost, desperate, but Warlock remembered a girl who once pitied Bastion, and look where that led them. He tore off its head in one sharp yank and held it there in his hand, a parody of Hamlet even though he couldn’t will himself to speak the words, the jester’s art lost without an audience. Just as he went to drop it at last, too miserable even for parroted soliloquies, the cold eyes blinked once and caught him in their empty gaze.

「モ・ウ・イ・チ・ド・ア・エ・テ・ヨ・カ・ッ・タ」

The head burned from within, withering to dust between his fingers.

Warlock didn’t move. Inside, he reached out for those forbidden scripts, fed the audio through them, focused his entire being on speeding up the analysis to conclude—

No. _No._

He turned back to Utopia, searching, searching, but the only transmode-carrier in the entire sphere was him.

Illogical. His sensors must have fritzed, overloaded. Selfsoulfriendoug went to the command center, that was his post, and he would never ever abandon his post unless—unless it was his place to—no, Warlock couldn’t even think it, his fears melted away as that furnace of energy burned in his chest, but terror boiled and wove through his circuits and the sky still bled, redredred.

The bridge. Warlock folded in on himself as he landed among the rubble of the heavier fighting, bending back the teeth and the spines until he was almost real again, almost friendly, too absent-minded to check his reflection as he scanned desperately for his teammates. Sam was fetching Illyana from Limbo, Shan was with the wounded, Roberto in the city, Amara and Dani out here on the bridge, and emptiness where selfsoulfriend should be, a rift working its way between his every cell, wider and wider with every passing moment, falling to pieces with every hopeless sweep of data without answer—

“Warlock!”

AmaraAmaraAmaraAmara

“You okay?” she asked, throwing off her exhaustion in favor of concern. She’d plopped down to catch her breath next to a molten pile of deactivated Nimrods.

Warlock pulled her to her feet, frantically lifting her one arm and then the other, circling around her thrice to be sure. Living. Acceptable. Two selfriends accounted for. (Three? Rahne where was Rahne was she in New York why didn’t she call where was—)

Amara grabbed his shoulders and gave him a firm little shake, hoping he’d pull himself together. “Warlock, selfriend, calm down—we won, we’re fine. We’re gonna be fine.”

There was too much—everything terroranxietydespair, he needed to keep searching but there was too much power in him, he brimmed with it like never before, pulled in every direction at once, and how could Amara touch him when there was so much blood on his hands, call him selfriend when he was abomination—blood on her cheek, she bled even as the earth’s molten rage, illogical—and he was Technarch and murderer, he was no different from these gutted monsters, he—he missed her so terribly—where was— _there_.

The silver sphere farther down the bridge flared, and he heard screams. Light.

He yanked Amara against his chest and kicked off just as Bastion cleaved the bridge in two.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> もう一度会えてよかった。　I’m glad I could see you again.
> 
> (If the Nimrods hadn't started babbling in katakana, I could've resisted, _really I could_ , but no...)


	4. Homecoming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everything turns out okay.

No numbers, no language, no fear.

Nothing.

Off.

.

.

On.

Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. Lungs burning. Improvise. Breathe.

Don’t breathe, don’t breathe, bad plan, water everywhere.

_“Doug!”_

…Dani?

Pain. His head cracked against the pavement, and he coughed up a mouthful of seawater, scowling at the miserable taste. Breathing hurt. Relief outweighed it.

With a groan, Doug cracked open his eyes. The world shifted as a synesthetic kaleidoscope, senses crashing into each other, data half-gathered and useless. His head lulled back against the pavement.

So much noise.

Hands on his shoulders, furiously shaking him back to awareness. Water droplets running down the slope of Dani’s nose. His own hair wet, too, and matted against his forehead. Dani’s mouth twisting, frowning and smiling at once. Everything in double.

“Why are we wet?” Doug asked, but his mouth only formed a warble of wild w’s.

Dani didn’t answer his mumble. She raised her head, glancing anxiously around, and the sharpness of her eyes told him they were on a battlefield. Which one, he hadn’t a clue.

“Did we win?” he tried again. He couldn’t even hear his own voice. She probably couldn’t either.

Dani looked back at him and let out a tense breath. “Don’t you ever do that again,” she told him, and he nodded along, eager to please even if he hadn’t the slightest idea what she was talking about. “No running off to save the world without letting us know, Doug. Team rule. We don’t go it alone.”

Battlefields weren’t the place for lectures. Her stern tone drew laughter from his throat, and his lips quirked a smile because they didn’t know what else to do. “Scout’s honor,” Doug choked, saying it twice to make sure she heard.

She told him something more, but the words all slipped away. The world couldn’t hold him.

But he’d stay.

.

.

Doug woke to warmth. For a little while he knew nothing else, drifting through a sea of half-dreams that shifted and scattered at the slightest touch. He found himself tucked tightly into bed back in his room, but hadn’t any idea how he got there. With the curtains drawn and the lights all switched off, the room matched the murky darkness behind his eyelids save for one crucial difference — his own loyal lighthouse perched on the edge of his bed, eyes glowing softly with unparalleled concern.

Warlock sat leaning over him with a hand pressed tight at the side of his face, calm and still like he’d been there a very long time. Techno-organics prickled softly against Doug’s cheek, and he could feel the slightest link, the slightest breath of lifeglow threading through him. New, but somehow familiar. Home.

“Hey,” Doug whispered, wary of breaking the peaceful calm.

Warlock blinked once, but didn’t answer. His thumb brushed over Doug’s cheek.

“Systems clear?” Doug asked. His own words surprised him, so hoarse and slurred with exhaustion. The last thing he remembered was reprogramming the Master Mold, or at least trying to—how he found his way back to the present was a mystery he didn’t care to solve. When he tried to sit up, a firm hand pushed him back down.

“No traces of foreign code,” Warlock confirmed. The chill of his voice made Doug shiver, though neither drew away from the other, and then Warlock’s voice sharpened even more bitterly, cutting through the groggy fog in Doug’s head. “Self is…unquantifiably angry with you.”

No, not angry. Though Doug was too tired to do much more than open his eyes, he could still read the fear coiled tight in Warlock’s every inch. He tried to pat Warlock on the arm to comfort him, but his hand merely flopped a bit uselessly on top of the blanket. “Won’t do it again,” he promised instead.

Warlock’s shoulders fell, and he looked away. “You are lying.”

“Won’t do it again _alone_ , selfsoulfriend.” Doug offered a lazy smile and tipped his cheek against Warlock’s hand, trying to inch closer to that intoxicating warmth. Next time they would brave dystopia together. Of course, ideally there wouldn’t be a next time for that particular catastrophe, but wasn’t it the thought that counted?

Warlock absentmindedly thumbed a stray lock of hair out of Doug’s eyes as he searched his face for clues, trying to decode that simple pledge and weighing it against all the broken ones. He knew it wasn’t a promise anyone could keep; he’d broken it himself. But he hadn’t heard Doug use that word since before—before _everything_. And it was the only word that mattered.

“Go back to sleep,” Warlock hummed. He hung his head down low and bumped his forehead against Doug’s.

“M’sorry.”

“Self forgives you.” He didn’t give Doug the chance to clarify. It didn’t matter. Warlock would always forgive his selfsoulfriend. “Back to sleep.”

“How long have I—”

Warlock’s fingers stretched and curled across Doug’s eyes as a blindfold. “Self commands you to sleep.”

It was all too easy to obey, fatigue so eager to pull him back under, but Doug had to make sure of one last thing. He managed to lift his hand high enough to lay it on Warlock’s arm, and even though he wouldn’t be able to see the answer from behind the blindfold, he asked, “’Lock…you okay?”

“You are here. Self will be fine. Go to sleep.”

Doug felt the words deep in his chest, more tangible than absolution. He mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like _okie dokie_ , and a few moments later Warlock could sense him slip back into slumber.

Warlock slowly shifted his hand back to its place against Doug’s cheek, and lay his weary head down on top of the blanket. The world weighed too heavy. But for now, the world could wait outside their room.

“Self is here, selfsoulfriend. You will be fine.”


End file.
